Nexus 3.0 Technology Preview (Milestone 5 Release)

21 Sept. 2015: With giant steps we are moving forward towards the release of Nexus 3.0. The new Milestone 5 release adds support for a completely new repository format - Docker. Just with all other formats you can proxy and host repositories. For Docker users in the DevOps realm this is a significant release since it allows you to run on-premises, private Docker registries with Nexus with an open source solution. No other product out there offers this.

And it was all built on top of the format-agnostic storage system introduced in the last milestone release. We have further improved it by adding features such as browsing repositories and accessing component details in the Nexus user interface.

Beyond that we improved and introduced numerous smaller features related to the user interface, tasks and other functionality of Nexus.

Curious and can’t wait? Download a Nexus OSS bundle and do a fresh install of the release right now. And if you want to be a little more cautious, read about what’s new and what to to be careful about.

Is there documentation?

What’s New?

If this is your first time trying a Nexus 3 milestone release, check out our notes for previous releases. These are all available in the Nexus 3 Milestone Release area of our Knowledge Base. It will give you a good background for any of the previous changes, especially those related to the user interface as well as installation procedures.

The significant new features of this milestone release are:

Docker

Docker container usage is revolutionizing development and operations workflows everywhere. The benefits are tremendous. This milestone release of Nexus 3 adds full support for Docker registries. You can configure proxy repositories of Docker Hub and any other repository. This allows you to avoid repeated downloads of Docker images and layers, by caching them in Nexus running in your network. Creating a hosted repository enables you to have completely private Docker repositories within your organization enabling the exchange of proprietary images between development teams as well as for QA and production usage. All those repositories can be wrapped in a repository group, so that your Docker users still have to deal with only one URL and gain access to a much larger set of images.

Beyond these features we have simplified the required SSL setup for Nexus and added support for Docker specific search. And of course Repository Browsing and Component and Asset Detail views work for Docker as well…​

Repository Browsing

You want to know whats in all those different repositories? What got proxied from nuget.org? Or the Central Repository? What release got deployed to your hosted repository? What Docker images have been pulled from Docker Hub? All these questions and many others can now be answered with the new repository browsing user interface in Nexus. You can access all the components and their assets per repository.

Component and Asset Details

You can browse your repository or find components via the search functionality, but now what. With the new component and asset details view you can see all the details about each component including the repository format agnostic characteristics like name and version, but also all the different attributes used in the different formats and associated to the components and assets.

Known Issues

We are currently working to resolve an issue that specifically impacts the ability to browse repositories. When first navigating to a repository, the list of components or assets may appear blank until you either scroll, refresh, or come back to the page.

For this milestone, we have added Docker Registry v1 capabilities so that we could get early feedback on how Docker fits within Nexus. Docker v2 specific features are currently unavailable though are being worked as part of the next milestone and will likely be complete as part of the GA release. A full list of v2 features is available here. We plan on getting feedback from the community along the way to help fine tune how we support you all into the future.